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Is China Creating the World's Largest Botnet Army?
david_a_eaves writes "The Chinese government is mandating that all computers sold in China come with Internet blocking software. Rob Cottingham writes an excellent piece noting how the censorship application of this software should be the least of our concerns. This new software may create an opportunity for the Chinese Government to appropriate these computers and use them to create the worlds largest botnet army."
Update: 06/11 21:26 GMT by T : J. Alex Halderman writes "My students and I have been examining the Green Dam censorware software. We've found serious vulnerabilities that can be exploited by any web site a user visits with the software installed. We also found that some of the blacklists seems to have been taken from the American-made filtering program CyberSitter. We've posted a report and demo."
Would it be easier to just sever the undersea fibre cable to China if it's really such a grave threat?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Should make it easier to block during an attack....
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
Well if they are it's certainly more threatening than a bunch of terracotta warriors.
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- - VanCondo
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Obama: Hey Ballmer, you mind if we borrow 90% of the world's computers for a quick cyber war?
Ballmer: Finally, the moment I've been waiting for! *Throws ceremonial war chair at wall*
A few million Stormtroopers standing on the surface of the Death Star with ThinkGeek green lasers.
Archimedes would be proud!
(Think before you mod me offtopic.)
The goal, authorities say, is to protect children from pornography
Of course, that morsel isn't for the Chinese people. They could tell their own people "we're creating a botnet to terrorize you", and nothing would happen. In fact, it's for the benefit of people in other countries. Social conservatives everywhere will exclaim "what an excellent goal!" Those people have simply failed to realize that governments will use whatever power they have for whatever they want, and never exclusively for its "intended purpose". The US does this too, but they've been moving more slowly because more people fail to notice when the power shift is gradual.
For the sake of argument, let's assume this is the case. (And to correct me if I am wrong here.) To be able to block, at the very least the packet header has to be examined. If remote attacker can generate packets faster than you can examine and drop them, you've just been DoS'ed. Multiply the number of packets by the number of computers in China...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Let me get this straight.
China further on intruding on its citizens who are already exploited and given no voice is a valid concern -- until it causes the rest of the world the slightest discomfort?
Whale
I advice any government to use in their networks only SW they can compile by themselfes!
And even more important: use routers ( and switches ) where they compiled the firmware/software themselves!
Look, in a "cyber war" you don't fight with DoS attacks, you fight by simply severing the undersea cables. If we were really "attacked" by China this way (which, we won't be, it would end their economy and their leaders seem to be halfway sane unlike that of North Korea) we could simply sever the lines.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Did I miss something or isn't this essentially the same story as this:http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/06/11/1347219/Chinese-Govt-Spyware-Puts-Computers-At-Risk?art_pos=9
From the FA:
Conceivably, everything from hospitals to electrical power grids could be targets.
Here's a thought! Make sure hospitals and electrical power grids AREN'T ON THE INTERNET! This is hard? VPNs and darknets are hard??
Choir, consider yourself preached to.
What makes a botnet potentially devastating is that it can create traffic that's indistinguishable from legitimate traffic. When a large enough number of computers from random locations request a page from your webserver, how do you sort the bad requests from the good? It's the slashdot effect on steroids.
If all the traffic was originating from within a particular country, it would be straightfoward to drop that traffic and let other traffic through.
It's interesting to note that in the early days, it wasn't possible to determine geographic location based on IP address. Address blocks were originally assigned rather haphazardly. As the number of networks grew, routers had to store larger and larger routing tables. Eventually this led to a push to reorganize address block allocations in a more hierarchical fashion, which ultimately made geolocation possible.
All we have to do is filter them out at our end of the intercontinental cables and the army can't get in here. The same applies to everyone else so a Chinese botnet army only threatens China.
The only reason botnets are so effective is they are distributed. When they come from all over the place, you have to do a ton of individual blocks. If they are all from the same IP space, ok just black hole China's space and that's it. Wouldn't take a block from very many top level providers and they'd be doing nothing at all.
How is this troll? Did this guy beat a mod in an earlier slashdot debate?
trusting the chinese government at their word is equally foolish. there are no deep nefarious plots and twisty hidden meanings in this piece of censorware most probably. but at the same time, the chinese government is certainly no paragon of virtue that we should trust is motivated by exactly what they say
not that western nations are any more trustworthy. its just that there is this idiotic notion i often encounter that says "western critics are complaining the chinese have hidden purposes, so since i don't trust western mouthpieces, i'll believe the chinese at their word that they are completely virtuous and innocent in their motivations"
you know, like iran is enriching uranium for peaceful purposes. "that's what they said, that's what i believe. because i won't be a naive idiot for the west. i choose to be a naive idiot for the west's enemies"
hey, here's a radical idea: how about you trust no one and be a naive idiot for no one? that is: distrust the west, distrust china, and distrust iran, all at the same time
thunderclap
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...would seem to have some serious limitations.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"it could build one in "traditional" way using viruses etc."
yea, it's a huge vector for launching a traditional attack though. It hasn't got to go boom on day one, the attack could begin silently by spreading crap slowly over the course of years.
Other than that, I'm guessing Chinese Wikipedians are crapping themselves over this news.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Assuming that this is true - all the bots would be contained inside China
If they unleashed the botnet on something outside China
1) Would it not just crush the internal network(s) inside China?
2) Would it not just crush the connections to the rest of the world?
3) Would it not just crush the massive control and filter systems?
4) Would it not just super easy to identify and quarantine?
What am I missing here?
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
No, all your computer belong to someone who wants to harm China. This is more of a threat to China itself, than anyone else.
From a point of view outside China, this botnet is not distributed. It all shares a few links (possibly saturating them if the botnets gets too crazy), shares netblocks, etc. This botnet isn't capable of doing anything that the Great Firewall operators aren't already able to do.
From a point of view inside China, the botnet is distributed and its crap looks like it's coming from everywhere.
All your computer are belong to US.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Don't panic, we will be ok! I have Windows Firewall!!!
TODAY?
Why are the replies modded funny? Someone's doing a crappy job of moderating today.
Or a great job. Personally, I find it entertaining to read a comment waiting for the punchline, then re-read it thinking I 'missed' something. It speaks volumes to degree I have been conditioned to trust the mods. A round of "off-modding" like this gives me a chance to reflect on my own reading-of-Slashdot habits. Quite refreshing.
Of course, in all my comments I make sure to include a "little bit of everything", so that the less discerning reader can say "Oh! That's why this comment is Insightful/Interesting/Informative/Funny/Flamebait/Troll/Off-topic!".
Also, I think the mods are on crack.
Also, fuck you.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
The Chinese government obviously understands their people better than we do. No other government anywhere, at any time in human history, has directly controlled so many people as the current Chinese government. Success counts for something. Obviously in some basic ways they're brilliant at being a government.
So let's grant for argument that they're telling the truth: That pornography is among the most dire current threats to the continuity of their control of their population. We need to get funding from our own government to build a massive distributed porn collection, that in times of crisis can be forwarded by every available channel and modality to China. Thus can we destroy them!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
This reminds me of the 60's when there were actually people who believed that all of those little Japanese cars were programmed to fall apart when a signal came from Tokyo. We'd be stuck with no transportation and Japan would finally win the war.
I'm not saying this couldn't be done with computer software today. But obviously paranoia isn't limited by technology.
-- Should there be smoke coming out of my CPU?
*sigh* I thought it was the most well known classic blunder not to start a LAN war in Asia!
*DUCKS*
1, Get 'elected' as high government official at the Industrial and Information Department.
2, Start your own company (using someone else's name of course) selling filter software (with OpenCV (BSD licensed) binary lib without any proper credit).
3, Win the contract in the government <sarcasm>public bidding</sarcasm>.
4, Enjoy mandatory installation across the country.
5, The one-year free trial expires.
6, ???
7, PROFIT!